Product Description

Love Vanilla?
Award-winning pastry chef and Food Network star Gale Gand considers vanilla the lingerie of baking: It’s an invisible essential, the thing you put on before anything else; but when given the spotlight, it’s every bit as sexy and alluring as chocolate–vanilla fans would say even more so. In this flip/cookbook, Gand offers tips on working with both vanilla beans and vanilla extract, revealing which is best for what, and includes a helpful substitution guide. And then it’s on to the good stuff: recipes for irresistible sweets that showcase vanilla’s beguiling flavor. With one section devoted to desserts using whole vanilla beans–think Vanilla Raspberry Rice Pudding with Lemon-Vanilla Caramel and Late-Night Vanilla Flan–and another focusing on extract–such as Vanilla-Blueberry Crumb Cake and Boston Cream Cupcakes–these are recipes that are anything but plain vanilla.

Love Chocolate?
Say the word chocolate and a chocoholic’s face lights up with visions of utterly satisfying, rich pleasures. In this fun flip/cookbook, award-winning pastry chef and Food Network star Gale Gand shares her favorite ways to indulge family and friends–and yourself.

Gand offers tips on buying and working with chocolate, including demystifying those ever-confusing cacao percentages, before getting down to business with more than thirty luscious, tempting recipes. Organized by type of chocolate–dark, semi-sweet, milk, and white–they run the gamut from simple treats such as Chocolate-Praline Cake in a Jar and Creamy Dreamy Walnut Fudge to impress-the-guests desserts that include Mexican Hot Chocolate Fondue and Chocolate-Almond Upside-Down Cake. Accompanied by amusing anecdotes, helpful make-ahead notes, and clear, uncomplicated techniques, Gand’s creations are as much fun to make as they are to eat.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #519054 in Books
• Brand: Cookbook
• Published on: 2006-10-10
• Released on: 2006-10-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 144 pages

About the Author
Gale Gand is the James Beard Award—winning executive pastry chef and partner of the acclaimed restaurant Tru in Chicago. Known across the country as the host of Sweet Dreams, which was the Food Network’s first daily show devoted entirely to baking, Gand has her own root beer company and line of bakeware. She lives in Illinois with her husband and three children. This is her sixth cookbook.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chocolate-Praline Cake in a Jar

For a few years now I've been a judge at the Whirlpool Accubake Unique Cake Contest, which is similar to the Pillsbury Bake-Off. A chocolate cake with a pecan and butterscotch toffee topping called Chocolate Coffee Toffee Cake by Elizabeth Kirsch from Pennsylvania won first place in 2002 and the $10,000 prize, which she donated to Heifer International. Elizabeth told me she made her cakes in glass canning jars and would tuck one into her husband's business trip luggage so he wouldn't miss his favorite cake while he was out of town. This simplified version of her cake would be perfect to take to a picnic or even a backyard barbecue.

Makes 10 to 12 servings

You'll Need
Ten to twelve 1/2-pint canning jars
Rimmed baking sheet or roasting pan

For The Cake
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 1/2 cups packed light brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
6 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups sifted cake flour
2/3 cup sour cream
2/3 cup brewed coffee (I just use the morning’s leftover coffee)

For the Praline Topping
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
3/4 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1/2 cup water
1 cup powdered sugar
1/2 cup pecan halves or pieces

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Place 10 to 12 1/2-pint glass canning jars on a rimmed baking sheet, evenly arranged with space between them. (If you have a Silpat liner, place it under the jars to prevent them from sliding around.)

To make the cakes, in a mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, beat the butter until smooth. Add the brown sugar and eggs and mix until fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add the vanilla, cocoa, baking soda, and salt and mix until combined. Add half of the flour, then half of the sour cream, and mix until combined. Repeat with the remaining flour and sour cream. Drizzle in the coffee and mix until smooth. The batter will be thin, like heavy cream.

Pour the batter into the jars, filling them halfway. Bake until the tops of the cakes are firm to the touch, about 25 minutes.*

To make the topping, melt the butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat, then add the brown sugar and 1?2 cup water and stir with a wooden spoon until the sugar is dissolved, 2 to 3 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the powdered sugar until combined, then return to the heat and bring to a boil. Stir in the nuts.

Pour the praline topping over the cakes to cover, working quickly, because the praline hardens quickly as it cools. Let the cakes cool completely if they aren’t already, before screwing on jar lids.**

Do-Aheads
*The cakes can be made ahead, cooled, covered, and kept at room temperature for 2 days or in the refrigerator for up to 4 days.

**The finished cakes will keep for up to 4 days at room temperature.

Customer Reviews

Gale Gand's typical light touch, Great source on vanilla!
`chocolate and vanilla' by Chicago star pastry chef and Food Network maven, Gale Gand, with co-author credits for Lisa Weiss is a gimmick book on at least two levels. Ms. Gand is the co-owner of Tru (along with former husband, executive chef Rick Tramonto), one of the most highly honored restaurants in Chicago. But unlike her business partner Rick's cookbooks, which aspire to the heights of sophistication reached by Thomas Keller and fellow Chicagoan, Charlie Trotter, Ms. Gand's books all tend to be very light, with recipes almost always oriented to simply having fun in the kitchen. This also sets her books apart from the excellent cookbooks by other leading pastry chefs such as `The Sweet Life' by Chanterelle pastry chef, Kate Zuckerman and `The Secrets of Baking' by Spago pastry chef, Sherry Yard.

This is above all, a gimmick book, which is rare in cookbooks for adults. The most obvious manifestation of the book's surprise approach is that it is not really a book about chocolate and vanilla together, but two completely separate books, one about vanilla and the other about chocolate. The two are bound together between the same covers, but the book on the one subject is printed upside down and backwards against the text of the other text. This is initially surprising, since vanilla and chocolate together is one of the most dramatic arguments for the notion of `terroir' in the whole culinary world. As Ms. Gand points out in her independent introductions to the two products, both are native to central America, including what is now southern Mexico, and, the pre-Columbian cultures actually used the two together in their `hot chocolate' preparations, along with another famous New World product, chiles. This admixture of vanilla and chocolate is no geographical accident, as it is still a universal practice today to add vanilla to chocolate products to help bring out its flavor. When these two products made their way to Europe on the conquistador's galleons, the combination fell into disuse, as the combination of chocolate with sugar made a much bigger impression on the early European chocoheads.

I must note at this point that Ms. Gand and her book team at Clarkson Potter dropped the ball in editing this book when they referred to Europe and not the Americas as the `New World'. There are a few other geographical oddities of expression, but none except this one will do anything to spoil your enjoyment of this book.

Since this book is all about having fun with baking, it may not be seen as a `must buy', especially for those who already own several good books on baking and at least one good book on chocolate. This is especially true as Ms. Gand does not even present the technique of tempering chocolate, and none of her recipes require that the home cook do any tempering themselves. She has a nice but short story of how chocolate was distributed around the world and how it's processing evolved over the last 400 years, but a book dedicated to chocolate will have all this and more.

The real hero of this book is not chocolate, but vanilla. Vanilla may be the Rodney Dangerfield of culinary products. Where everyone craves chocolate and saffron has the pride of being the most expensive spice, vanilla languishes as the second most expensive spice and a supporting player to chocolate's star. As a result, vanilla gets little or no special notice in all the cookbooks I've read, even the best ones on herbs and spices. Ms. Gand redresses all these lapses. Her treatment of how to make the best use of vanilla is easily the best to be found anywhere.

For starters, she identifies the very best geographical sources for vanilla bean. But, her biggest contribution for the culinarily fussy may be her technique for coaxing the vanilla seeds from their pods in a way that avoids also picking up strands of fiber, similar to the white webbing which holds the seeds in chiles. Miss Gale predictably warns us against artificial vanilla flavorings and `vanillin flavoring', a blend of natural and artificial vanilla. On the other hand, she instructs us on the uncommon preparations, vanilla paste and vanilla powder, both made from natural vanilla. Another especially valuable bit of information is the source of the very best vanilla products (Nielsen-Massey). Unfortunately, this appears on the page of sources that appears only on page 79 of big brother chocolate's half of the book.

Just as the chocolate recipes are divided up between dark, semi-sweet, light and milk, and white chocolate ingredients, vanilla recipes are divided up between those that use vanilla seeds and those that use vanilla extract. The hallmark application of vanilla seeds on its own is in custards and the world of products derived from them such as ice cream, flans, crème Anglaise, mousse, pastry fillings, and glazes. The most typical use of vanilla extract is baked goods such as cakes, where the flavor is intimately mixed with flour and sugar. I confess the boundary between seed and extract seems pretty thin, and I suspect that the two are pretty interchangeable, except where you want to avoid the sight of the little black specks in your finished goods.

As I said above, almost all the recipes in this book lie somewhere between easy (vanilla flan) and really easy (vanilla malteds) for someone who likes to bake. Like Missy Gand's earlier books, that makes it an especially good resource for baking with kids. That doesn't mean the recipes are quick. It also doesn't mean they have no interest to the hoity-toity among us who like recipes with a pedigree. I can think on two more well bred recipes than the vanilla charlotte (a dish destined to be making a comeback) and the vanilla-scented peach Tarte Tatin. If your guests have seen one too many tiramisu dishes, try the charlotte!

At half the price of the premium baking books, this one is worth every penny.

2 books in 1. A chocolate book and a vanilla book.
I just bought this book and made a recipe right away. I tried the Golden Cake with Fudge Frosting. The cake and the frosting were delicious. However, I would suggest that you reduce the amount of almond extract to maybe half of what is called for. The cake had a overwhelming almond taste. Not bad, just overwhelming.
The setup of the book was helpful. When you turn to the table of contents, the recipes are organized according to the kind of chocolate called for ie; semi sweet, white ect. The Vanilla side is organized by either beans or extract.
There is also a brief history of chocolate and vanilla included. There are picture of some of the recipes in the middle of the book.
As far as the level of expertise needed, I would rate this easy.
I am happy with my purchase.

Buy another book
Tonight I tried my fourth recipe in this book. Not one of them was I proud to serve.

They've tasted fine, but not great. Tonight's cake might as well have been from a box... in fact, a box cake might have been better.

I was very excited to get this book. I looked for it in local book stores and then ended up buying it sight-unseen because of the good review from Martha Stewart and the gimicky set-up.

Don't make my mistake, buy another book!